Mobility of the Future

You’ve spoken about how car ownership isn’t even really feasible in the age of ride sharing. Can you tell us a little bit about your thinking around that?

If we think about what it really means to own a car, it comes with these benefits: You get a car that you can leave your things in; you essentially have a zero wait time if you live with a garage or a parking spot outside; and you get to pick the car you want.

Today, those benefits are generally better than the alternatives. If you want to use Uber all the time, you have to pay a lot, wait five minutes, and you can’t just leave your stuff in the car.

With self-driving cars, what’s really going to change is that all those benefits of ownership can be cloned in a service model, once labor is no longer the main cost of the service. If you think about the future, you will be able to get all the benefits of ownership with

very low wait time to no wait time, and potentially even be able to leave your things in a car.

You will also never have to worry about maintenance, or fueling, or insurance, and will be able to switch out the car anytime you want for something that actually meets your needs. You can imagine these models where you can get those benefits that you can’t really see in the world today where labor costs which are time-dependent are really the key driver of your consumer cost. Autonomy unlocks the shift from time to a usage-based cost structure.

As services become cheaper and more available, it just becomes so much more pleasant as a consumer to have a service-oriented model than to have this single asset that you’re tied to for many years.

What would you say are the top three challenges facing the mobility industry today?

For the car companies, it’s really a question of, what do you do really, really well? There’s a lot of change coming to the industry, some driven by autonomy, a lot driven by electrification. Electrification fundamentally changes what it really means to build a car.

If I’m the head of one of these businesses, I’d be thinking: Do I have what it really takes to compete in mobility? What does it even mean to compete in mobility? Do we need to start thinking about the electric vehicle supply chain differently? Are these scooters and bikes things that I should be making? What is the future of the simpler electric vehicle?

I would also think pretty seriously about how to partner with some of the software companies that seem to have more of an inside track on having a great relationship with users so that I can provide customers with a really holistic experience.

How do you see pricing models evolving? Is the whole mobility industry going to move to usage or consumption-based models?

This movement towards consumption is going to be a trend as we move more toward a service model for mobility. It makes you think about people’s inherent biases—they don’t necessarily love paying and being reminded each time they use something that they’re paying a certain fee for it. It will be a challenge to align the consumer demand for a single payment per month, “all you can eat” structure with the actual underlying cost. For transportation, it’s going to be a very interesting path to figure out the right balance between pure consumption pricing, and this “all you can eat” single charge model.

Self-driving cars have far reaching social implications. What are some of the implications a decade from now in terms of city planning and the ethics behind it?

If you think about it, transportation is one of those things that has had a huge impact on the history of cities and how they developed. It’s the connective tissue that connects the different fabrics of the social aspects of a city i.e. lowincome and high-income areas.

The question really comes down to how can we make sure self-driving cars as a technology are evenly distributed? What makes me excited is that in general, transportation is a pretty price competitive market, and for self-driving, in particular, that’s likely to remain the case. I think we’ll see this isn’t going to be a tool of the rich. It’s going to be something where many people have access to cheaper, safer, more convenient transportation than they’ve ever had in the past. I actually see some high potential for very good outcomes for cities if they take the right regulatory framework toward ensuring equitable access to technology.

What’s your take on the scooter and bike sharing businesses? Do you think it could scale to massive adoption in the US or internationally?

I am pretty excited and bullish about scooters and bikes and this micro-mobility revolution. In general, my basic take on humanity is people are pretty lazy. If you give them an option that takes them away from walking or having to park, and it’s pretty cheap, people are going to like it. There are a lot of those short trips where you always find yourself thinking – “Do you walk? Do you take an Uber? Do you take your car?” “How should I make this trip?” Scooters and bikes are a perfect option for that. And in many ways, they are great for the environment and urban traffic flows. I really hope that scooters and bikes actually become a major part of people’s transportation portfolio.